Despite Apple's patents on cell phone touch gestures, HTC was the first to bring a touch-gesture driven phone to the market, with its HTC Touch, released in June 2007. (Source: Overseas Electronics)

Company is standing up to Apple's patent claims

HTC
says in a press
release that it is prepared to fight back against Apple's
patent litigation in court. It has not yet filed an official
response or countersued, but that should follow within a few
weeks.

Apple is currently suing
HTC to block the import of Android handsets into the U.S.
Apple claims that it invented a host of technologies including a
touch-screen finger-swipe unlock gestures, mobile object oriented
graphics, and undervolting a mobile CPU via an interrupt. These
somewhat vague
and far-reaching patents form the basis of Apple's claims.
Apple CEO Jobs released a statement casting his company as the
tireless innovator and his rivals as thieves.

Peter Chou,
chief executive officer, HTC Corporation, says that HTC won't
tolerate Apple's bullying. He states, "HTC disagrees with
Apple's actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates
intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other
innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will
continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a
healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience
possible."

The press release points out that HTC achieved
many industry firsts -- the first Windows PDA (1998), the first
Windows Phone (2002), the first gesture-based smart phone (June
2007), and the first Google Android smart phone (October 2008).
Along the way it piled up a fair amount of intellectual property,
which could give it ammo against Apple in court.

Some are
speculating that Google, makers of the Android operating system, may
intervene and aid its handset developers legally to prevent
Apple trying to stomp out the growing Android movement at the
hardware level.

The stakes are high. If Apple wins, it
could effectively take many of the top Android handsets off the U.S.
market, including the HTC Hero, MyTouch, Nexus One, and
the soon-to-be-released
Incredible. If HTC wins, on the other hand, it will likely
damage Apple's image and give the Android movement more
momentum.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Apple started using x86 for their products because of market saturation. x86 was always faster and much faster speed bumps than PPC, thanks to market saturation. This is thanks to Microsoft. So you can say Apple is piggy backing on what Microsoft made popular/dominant. So you ask what Apple ripped off? They are using something Windows made popular. In your context of claiming WinMo7 is ripping stuff off, it seems like the same thing to me.

I never claimed MS invented multibutton mice. They did makeit the dominant type of mouse. How many years was Apple criticized for one button mice? Then they finally start offing multibutton mice. Microsoft didn't invent them, and Apple didn't invent any of the things you are claiming WinMo7 is ripping off.

Final quote, the argument makes sense because you are claiming including/excluding common features is what can be considered a copycat. The point I was making, and I think you picked up on, is that including/excluding features isn't a big deal and is part of the business. You pointing out that WinMo7 is ripping off iphone opens the can of worms my argument was aluding to.

There's still difference between ripping off a design of a product and switching hardware platform from less popular to more popular. The difference is: x86 was not designed by MS, while iPhone WAS designed by Apple.

quote: Apple didn't invent any of the things you are claiming WinMo7 is ripping off

Things alone just by themselves mean nothing, but when you start piecing them together you get a mosaic that looks exactly like iPhone 1.0. This little missing feature, that tiny missing feature, that newly added feature, this restriction, that one, this minor thing and that one - ALL TOGETHER were belonging to iPhone before.

So yeah, getting just someone's nose or piece of mustache is not going to give you someone else's face, but when you grab all the facial details of another person (figuratively speaking of course) your face suddenly looks JUST LIKE THAT OTHER GUY WE KNEW FOR SO LONG.

Same's with iPhone and WinMo7 - their "faces", their little features and restrictions look SO MUCH LIKE EACH OTHER that it's a nobrainer who ripped off who _this_ time.